From Avenir to UMX, Li Lin's return and new propositions
Author: Eric, Foresight News In the summer of 2026, UMX, which was incubated by Li Lin's Avenir Group, began public testing, which also made outsiders once again set their sights on this group of Chinese entrepreneurs in the crypto industry. Thirteen years have passed since Huobi was founded in 2013. At that time, Li Lin was standing in a market that had just taken shape. The problem he faced was very straightforward: how to make it easier for more people to trade Bitcoin. Thirteen years later, the crypto industry has moved from a relatively independent digital asset market to a new stage of continuous convergence with ETFs, stablecoins, RWA, and traditional securities. Over the past few years, Li Lin's role has also changed. In 2023, he founded Avenir Group in Hong Kong, gradually shifting from a frontline entrepreneur to an investor and asset allocator, continuing to focus on digital assets, securities trading, and financial infrastructure. Today, UMX has emerged as an “Avenir Group Incubator”, giving these seemingly scattered investment leads over the past few years a new perspective. Problems also followed. In the years since Huobi founded Avenir Group, what exactly is Li Lin doing, and what is it that has made him stand back to the stage now? From Beijing to Hong Kong, from athletes to referees, to understand this return, they must first go back to where they left. In September 2013, Huobi went online. It was a crazy year when Bitcoin rushed from 800 yuan to 8,000 yuan. It was also a year on the eve of Mentougou's collapse and the industry grew reckless. A young man from Hengyang, graduated from the Tsinghua Automation Department, wrote code for Oracle, and had started a business twice. Using the “permanent exemption of processing fees,” he cut through the Bitcoin exchange market, which had experienced rough experiences at the time. Half a year after launch, Huobi's daily transaction volume exceeded 1.5 billion yuan. At its peak, it occupied more than half of the global Bitcoin exchange market. Zhenge Fund, Dai Zhikang, and Sequoia Capital followed one after another, and Li Lin became one of the most familiar faces of entrepreneurs in the Chinese crypto world. Over the next decade, Huobi and Li Lin experienced a complete cycle of the crypto industry from early recklessness to global compliance competition. For an entrepreneur, this experience left behind not only how to become a trading platform, but also a complete set of perceptions about trading, liquidity, user needs, account systems, and risks. However, running a platform and allocating a sum of money is not the same way to look at the market. In 2023, Li Lin founded Avenir Group in Hong Kong. The name comes from French and means “better future”. From managing an exchange with your own hands to managing a multi-strategy family office, the roles have changed, and so has the way you look at the market. In the past, he was an athlete on the field, watching user growth, transaction volume, product lines, and liquidity, and was fighting closely with his opponents every minute and every second. Now he is sitting on the sidelines and working as a fund allocator, but what he sees is a different set of problems. Where are funds left idle, where are assets split, why can't accounts be exchanged, and why is risk difficult to be managed uniformly. These issues are hard to see from an operator's perspective, because exchanges naturally only care about matters within their own market. From the perspective of the configurator, they are so dazzling that one cannot ignore them. Avenir's actions over the past few years have vaguely outlined a main line. The list has been drawn up for a long time. It has taken a stake in UP Fintech, the parent company of Tiger Securities, as a core investor, participated in the US$300 million equity financing of the Hong Kong licensed platform OSL, invested in the institutional order routing company CoinRoutes and options derivatives infrastructure SignalPlus, led the AI native quantification platform Inference Research, and signed multiple assets with Tiger Securities and AMINA Bank on Consensus Hong Kong Infrastructure Cooperation Memorandum. According to the 13F filing submitted to the SEC, Avenir ranked first among Asian Bitcoin ETF institutions for eight consecutive quarters, with BlackRock IBIT alone holding more than 18 million shares. In addition, Avenir launched a $500 million quantitative partnership program to provide capital and ecological support to mature quantitative trading teams, and also acquired the Japanese compliant trading platform BitTrade through the Xinhua Group. The investment reach of licensed platforms, brokerage services, transaction execution, quantitative capabilities, and stablecoin payments covers almost every aspect required to connect the two markets. Looking at individual projects, these investments are scattered across different products and markets. When you look at it together, the direction gradually...
